Quickstalls: Pissing off business owners in a bid to please their customers

It’s been one year of countless tweaking and I thought to write this to help my partner and I keep sight of what we set out to achieve with Quickstalls when we started this journey a year ago.

Our mission was to ignore the demands of business owners and attend to the needs of their customers. This sounds like a bad idea for a B2B “start up” looking to make money, but we are two stubborn individuals who are willing to see it through regardless.

What even is Quickstalls?

Simply put, Quickstalls is a shopping website designed to allow for quick one page shopping and checkout. In simpler terms, with a Quickstalls shopping website, your customers can carry out all their shopping on one page and check out easily. This means reduced churn and less confused customers because they do not need multiple page navigation to find the products they want and to place an order.

As a customer, this is what you want! Quick shopping, less navigation, easy payment and checkout.

However, just as we are stubborn, business owners are stubborn too, and they hold dear the traditional shopping website models they are used to and which they also agree doesn’t work.

Still, they want a busy home page, an about us page, contact us page, multi-click product pages, category pages, tag pages, and even a page to track all the pages.

The good thing is, just as I mentioned earlier, we are stubborn too and we’re “always guiding”, ready to fight for what we believe in.

All of the above may sound like “yarns”, but let’s dig into the numbers for a bit.

So far, we have built over 20 stalls for small businesses, which have cumulatively achieved turnovers of over 3 million Naira. It seems like a small number, but what this has done is validate our idea and “stubborn” model.

It means their customers love it, and we have testimonials to that effect, I’ve attached one below as proof.

However, we can’t keep fighting our own customers (business owners), so we’ve spent the last few months fine tuning the inventory & order management systems and dashboards so it is as stress free as is possible for business owners. I know that’s not what they asked for, but once again, it’s something they need, so they are welcome.

Eventually, we will succumb to providing what they ask for, so we are currently working on Landing Page designs as a paid add-on to our Quickstalls offering. We are doing this because we agree that for certain marketing campaigns or promotions, you may want to highlight a few products and drive more attention that way. This is something we intend to roll out in Q4 2021.

Are we where we want to be?

Hell no! The kind of ease we envision is one where all the customer has to do is think and the product is added to cart. But I doubt there’s a technology for that at the moment, so we’ll keep working and tweaking until we get there.

We are also working on automating more internal process (things that happen behind the scenes) so as to shorten our website build time to seconds.

Also, we need to scale up our clientele and get our wonderful product in front of more users. We are currently failing forward at this, but we’re not stopping.

Outside of our key offering which is our Quickstalls Shopping Websites, we are essentially a design and development company and have worked on a number of custom landing pages, websites, and product builds. We are also looking to do more of these in the next 12 months.

I hope to publish a piece of this kind next year, but with crazy numbers.

Looking to give your customers the Quickstalls experience? Visit www.quickstalls.com and leave us a message through any of the channels.